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Do guys prefer self-help or to hire the skills of a professional / “expert”?
#51

Do guys prefer self-help or to hire the skills of a professional / “expert”?

Quote: (10-05-2018 08:50 PM)Seadog Wrote:  

I always get a kick out of people talking about "opportunity cost" of fixing your own plumbing or whatever. Unless you have infinitely scalable income, alongside infinitely variable hours, the opportunity cost of your time to learn these skills is likely 0. The vast majority of people either have a schedule set by someone else and consequently get paid for their 8 hours, or if self employed, when you do need to pull 20 hour days, you simply don't have the option to reduce it.

Opportunity cost or not, I can't see myself ever being in a position where I value my own time and cost per hour over doing something right the first time without leaving a mess behind and having no one else to blame for any fuckups besides myself. I'll gladly lose a few hours of sleep and/or a couple hours of work just to be absolutely sure something is done the right way, the way I want it, and looks like it was never touched or broken from the get go when it's done. There are few things I hate more in this world than fixing other people's fuckups, exponentially more so when I'm the one who foolishly paid them to fuck it up.
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#52

Do guys prefer self-help or to hire the skills of a professional / “expert”?

Quote: (10-05-2018 08:50 PM)Seadog Wrote:  

I always get a kick out of people talking about "opportunity cost" of fixing your own plumbing or whatever. Unless you have infinitely scalable income, alongside infinitely variable hours, the opportunity cost of your time to learn these skills is likely 0. The vast majority of people either have a schedule set by someone else and consequently get paid for their 8 hours, or if self employed, when you do need to pull 20 hour days, you simply don't have the option to reduce it.

There's a grain of truth here, except that opportunity cost also includes the utility of free time, which is non-linear. While you're describing people who overvalue their free time, a large percentage of people who have a reasonable income stream actually undervalue their free time.

Textbook case is furniture assembly. We bought some new patio furniture a few years ago and the sales guy at the box store was underselling the assembly service. $25. He kept stressing it's easy to assemble, and I, for some reason, believed him. For $25, it must be easy.

Well, fuck me. It came in about ten boxes, and I suspect he was the guy they sent to do assemblies and just didn't want to do it. There were about 20 poorly-fitting bolts in the table alone. Just the nuisance of unpacking that shit and sorting the nearly-identical parts was worth $25, and getting the 90 minutes back on a Saturday afternoon would have been worth an easy $100.

That's without having to learn anything I'll never use again.

The key is knowing what your actual number is and adjusting it based on how much you actually want to/don't want to do the work. If I start my personal time at $75/hour and replacing a light fixture is a thirty-minute job that I don't have strong feelings about, paying an electrician $75 to do it is dumb by a factor of two.

On the other hand, if you take the fixture down and find crumbling electrical work from 1950 held together by a chewing gum wrapper, that electrician might be worth every penny, as will his insurance policy if yours needs to subrogate later.

Hidey-ho, RVFerinos!
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